Yes. Chicken is an example of a prisoner’s dilemma, though with the key difference that it plays out in real time instead of a single instant.

Tragedy of the commons is usually the result of a large group game of chicken/PD.

Yes, this is clear enough in the long run. But the question is: will the transition happen fast enough to prevent a climate change catastrophe?

The issue with fighting climate change is that it’s a game of chicken between all the countries. If the UK goes all out and eliminates all emissions (at the cost of some portion of its economy) but every other country stays the course, then climate change just carries on and the UK’s sacrifice is in vain.

Similarly, if every other country in the world buckles down and stops climate change but the UK carries on, the UK ends up ahead. This means there is a double disincentive to cooperate on climate change.

Canada is going through this issue right now. The Liberal government has gone forward with carbon taxes and now these policies have become deeply unpopular. The Liberal party is now staring down the barrel of a potentially historic defeat in the upcoming election next year.

Oh okay that makes sense. I hope we see a story about some tool like that buying a shitty $100k Trump watch and getting their comeuppance. This is definitely someone who would complain about gas prices because there’s no way they could afford a watch like that without feeling hardship.

In my mind, the $100k watch sterotype fits more with one of those pimped out Hummers than a $70k pickup truck.

I doubt those guys complain about fuel prices either.

Granddaughter was the first one to get blocked!

The founders knew what they were doing. This was their way of cashing out some of the company while continuing to run it. All of the private equity tricks are designed to avoid paying taxes in the process.

$100k watches? I have seen many instances of the pickup truck driving stereotype but I’ve never seen any of them wearing any sort of watch, let alone an expensive one. Is this specific to some country?

That’s just a coincidence. 吗, meaning “what?”, is pronounced má which has the ascending tone. This is not true of all questions in Chinese. For example: 谁在你的右边 meaning “who is on your right?” does not end with 吗, and 边 is pronounced bian which has the flat tone.

800 hectares is 1976 acres. That’s a huge property. What sort of maintenance would you be doing? Farming? That’s almost 5 times the size of an average farm in the US. You’re talking about a large commercial farming operation, not an “off-grid lifestyle” property.

It doesn’t matter how much solar you build; without storage you’ve got zero power available at night.

The issue with overbuilding solar is that you drive daytime electricity prices to zero so that everyone is losing money on all these solar plants. Furthermore, base load plants such as nuclear plants also start losing money and they have no ability to shut down during peak hours. So you end up driving the base load plants out of business and they shut down permanently. Now you have even less capacity available at night! This causes nighttime power to become extremely unreliable, potentially leading to rolling blackouts and skyrocketing nighttime energy prices.

Another issue that people rarely discuss is the quality of power on the grid. All the grids in the world operate on 50/60 Hz AC which must be carefully maintained at an accurate frequency and synchronized with the grid. The main base load turbines are the source of this waveform which is carefully monitored and adjusted to remain stable.

Solar panels produce DC power which needs to be converted into AC with an inverter and synchronized with the grid. The problem is that if all the base load turbines are taken off the grid then there is nothing for the solar inverters to synchronize with! Turbines are nice and stable because they’re literally an enormous, massive spinning flywheel. Without them you’ll have an extremely unstable system where all of the solar plants are trying to adjust their frequencies and phases to match each other and the whole thing wanders all over the place.

The issue with the green energy transition (renewable energy, grid upgrades, grid scale storage, EVs, and elimination of fossil fuel household heating) is that well over 90% of all the critical minerals we need are mined and/or refined in China. No one wants to move any of this stuff to the US because the environmental damage and refining waste are extremely toxic, far more so than any other resource extraction we do here.

Furthermore, all the end-point usage of these resources (making solar panels, capacitors, semiconductors, printed circuit boards, and finished electronics assemblies) is all done in China as well. So if we mined and refined all the minerals we’d end up shipping them all to China to be used in manufacturing.

So now if you want to avoid all that you’re talking about building the entire electronics supply chain inside western countries. But then you face the further issue that there simply aren’t enough electrical engineers in the west to work at these factories. So now you’ve got to retool the entire education system to train a new generation for this critical work.

At the same time, you’re having to deal with the fact that most Americans don’t want to work in these places. TSMC has been very vocal about their struggles to build these chip foundries in the US and hire Americans at the low wages it actually takes to make this stuff competitive against the obscenely cheap products coming from China. Now consider the fact that TSMC is considered a crème de la crème employer in Taiwan, and the factories in China making capacitors and other bulk commodity components pay far less and have far lower margins, and you can begin to see the issue.

Americans want the green energy revolution but they don’t want to give up even an inch of quality of life to get it. Neither the rightest of the far right Republicans nor the leftest of the far left Democrats has expressed any desire to volunteer to lower their own standard of living. The whole story thing is a big fight to try to force other people to lower theirs.

Ahhhh this is an absolute tragedy. The same thing goes with many movies from the golden age of Hollywood. I love to watch these old films. It breaks my heart that so many are lost forever.

“Economic problem” isn’t merely short form for “if we had a socialist system we could solve it with free money.” These solutions require us to dig huge amounts of minerals out of the ground and tear the earth apart in the process. And we’re already doing that at a rate exponentially larger than we ever have in history. Plus these are the same materials we need to build the batteries for EVs, so building them for grid storage competes with the EV transition.

And then you factor in the rapidly increasing electric demand we’re producing by switching over to EVs and that means the demand on the grid is even higher. The grid wasn’t built to be able to source power from everywhere so putting solar panels on everyone’s rooftops is making the situation even worse.

If you’re spending billions to build a solar plant that has to turn off all the time during peak hours then you’re wasting your money. That seems like a fundamental issue to me, not a non-issue.

I’ve looked around quite a bit for The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. No one seems to have the complete series. The show ran nightly for 30 years and amassed 6714 episodes so it would be quite a large torrent.

Rice pudding. Tapioca pudding. Both excellent with raisins.

I do love stuffing with dried cranberries though! And traditional Christmas fruitcake with myriad dried fruits and nuts!

No, of course not. Competition needs to be preserved through strong antitrust laws. The US used to have a very active FTC which sued to prevent mergers and attempted to break up monopolies in order to preserve competition. Then it went through a long period of inactivity due to monopoly-friendly governments.

Now, the Biden administration and their appointee, Lina Khan, have resumed this important work. Of course, this could all be jeopardized if Trump wins the election, but so could a lot of other important things.

As for Canada, we favour oligopolies under a misguided theory that large Canadian businesses will protect Canadians from foreign competitors to the south. We’re paying the price for having no trustbuster with teeth, like Lina Khan.

You said you had to buy a cheaper home to make money from the equity in your home. That is not true, and the examples I have showed how.

As for “free”, what is free is the increase in value of your home over time. That’s the investment part. There are people who bought homes in San Francisco back in the 1970’s who are now multi-millionaires simply due to the many-fold increase in the value of their home. With a HELOC or a reverse mortgage they can gain access to some or all of that money without needing to move to a cheaper house.

Capitalism didn’t invent greed. Humans have been killing each other and stealing each other’s resources for tens of thousands of years. Greed isn’t even exclusive to humans. If you’ve ever seen what foxes or weasels can do to a henhouse, or what giant Asian hornets can do to a beehive, then you’ll see what I mean.

Capitalism is just the idea that competition leads to better outcomes for everyone and that the best competitors are people who put their own resources on the line (rather than someone else’s). What we’re seeing today is consolidation and centralization of wealth and power, the exact opposite of competition. Anyone celebrating this is not a capitalist, they’re a (wannabe) oligarch.

As for empathy, I think the only way to build that is to work directly with people and try to make a difference in their lives. Economic planning and policy making does not achieve empathy, you have to already have empathy going into it.